Content Farm to Content Table

The single most amazing story of the election was thrown up on the Intertoobz on Thursday by Buzzfeed News. It describes how the campaign of the Republican presidential nominee has re-energized the economy of Macedonia, and it is, well, just amazing.

"Your Prayers Have Been Answered," declared the headline. For Trump supporters, that certainly seemed to be the case. They helped the baseless story generate over 140,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. Meanwhile, roughly 6,000 miles away in a small Macedonian town, a young man watched as money began trickling into his Google AdSense account. Over the past year, the Macedonian town of Veles (population 45,000) has experienced a digital gold rush as locals launched at least 140 US politics websites. These sites have American-sounding domain names such as WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co, and USADailyPolitics.com. They almost all publish aggressively pro-Trump content aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the US.

It is nice to know that the United States remains a target-rich environment for the world's most enterprising gifters, because this Balkan cottage industry—which may be conducted in actual cottages, for all I know—has absolutely nothing to do with politics and absolutely everything to do with separating suckers from their money. Enter the Trump campaign, which has roughly the same raison d'etre.

The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don't care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters. As a result, this strange hub of pro-Trump sites in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is now playing a significant role in propagating the kind of false and misleading content that was identified in a recent BuzzFeed News analysis of hyperpartisan Facebook pages. These sites open a window into the economic incentives behind producing misinformation specifically for the wealthiest advertising markets and specifically for Facebook, the world's largest social network, as well as within online advertising networks such as Google AdSense.

I am an old guy and, therefore, new to the ways of tout les Toobz, so I didn't know any of this. We are talking about the mass production of misinformation for profit, and it seems to be another field in which the rest of the world has caught up and passed America, which pretty much invented all the modern techniques of that craft.

"I started the site for a easy way to make money," said a 17-year-old who runs a site with four other people. "In Macedonia the economy is very weak and teenagers are not allowed to work, so we need to find creative ways to make some money. I'm a musician but I can't afford music gear. Here in Macedonia the revenue from a small site is enough to afford many things."

Can someone please buy this person a Marshall stack so we can get on with running the world's oldest democracy into the ground ourselves?

Most of the posts on these sites are aggregated, or completely plagiarized, from fringe and right-wing sites in the US. The Macedonians see a story elsewhere, write a sensationalized headline, and quickly post it to their site. Then they share it on Facebook to try and generate traffic. The more people who click through from Facebook, the more money they earn from ads on their website. Earlier in the year, some in Veles experimented with left-leaning or pro–Bernie Sanders content, but nothing performed as well on Facebook as Trump content.

No kidding. Give the Macedonian teenagers one thing—they can see their marks coming from more than an ocean away. But the story is illustrative of a larger problem with the way we cover politics in this country, a problem that, one hopes, has reached its apex with this godforsaken election. There no longer is any line between information and disinformation, between empirical fact and magical thinking, between truth and Colbertian "truthiness." All are now considered equally valid because the political system, and the creatures within it, are incapable or unwilling to differentiate between them.

On Thursday night, Brian Williams hosted the inexcusable Kellyanne Conway on his new show on the electric teevee machine, and Williams asked Conway about the now-debunked Fox News story about an imminent indictment of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The following exchange ensued:

Williams: "This has been walked back, the indictment portion, by Fox News who originally reported it and by NBC News which has done subsequent reporting on this. Will Donald Trump amend his stump speech to walk back the same thing?"

Conway: "Well, the damage is done to Hillary Clinton. No matter how it's being termed the voters are hearing it for what it is—a culture of corruption."

Conway went on to pass along threats from various Republicans in Congress to the effect that, if the nation has the brass to elect That Woman next Tuesday, they will make the second Clinton administration a bigger hell on earth than the first one was. She appeared insufferably pleased with herself.

"I'm wondering why more Democrats aren't asking Hillary Clinton to step aside, get off the ticket for the good of the party, for the good of the election, for the good of the country and why not a single Democrat as far as I can tell has unendorsed her or said I don't want to run on the ticket with someone who is not under one but two FBI investigations."

It went on from there.

Williams: "As a lawyer, you would concede indictment is not only a term of art, it's a term of law and that's a big difference to use the expression likely indictment when all the reporting is to the contrary."

Conway: "Fine. It just doesn't change what's in voters' minds right now and you see in the your own polling, you see in the other polling, Brian, which is—even though the polls were tightening before last Friday's explosive announcement by Mr. Comey you see that voters are putting it in this large cauldron of impressions and images and individuals and issues from which they eventually make a choice."

Silly Brian. The truth of something doesn't matter if you can sell the lie effectively. This is an example of what the redoubtable Digby calls "Cokie's Law," after Ms. Roberts of the Beltway Robertses, but it is something deeper and more menacing this time around. We are coming into the last weekend of the most critical presidential election at least since 1930 and it is now being fought out almost entirely in the field of misinformation.

The Russians clearly are trying to monkeywrench the proceedings. There are reports that the CIA and the FBI, two of our most durable domestic manufacturers of deceptive bullshit, are fighting with each other, and the FBI is clearly at war with itself, and both of these conflicts are playing themselves out publicly in the campaign. The Republican candidate has surrounded himself with an inner cadre of paid liars and career ratfckers more virulent than anything we've seen since the brawling presidential campaigns of the early 19th Century.

(James Callender was born far too early. He'd have made a fortune running his own phony news operation today, brewing up his poisons in that great cauldron of impressions that Kellyanne Conway has dedicated her entire political life to stirring.)

It might be the height of futility to mention this now but, for those of us in this racket, there never has been a more important weekend to be good at what we do. This is the truthless, wretched election that the country has brought upon itself. You can hardly blame the starving musicians in a distant land from trying to turn a buck on it.

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